


No Birds, But Bees

by euphorbic



Series: Angel of Cities [9]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, M/M, Miscarriage, Non-Linear Narrative, Pseudoscience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-28
Updated: 2013-03-28
Packaged: 2017-12-06 17:54:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/738463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/euphorbic/pseuds/euphorbic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Erik once implied he’d always been bonded to Charles, but that has never made sense to Charles. Now he’s catching the faintest impression from Erik of somebody else. As much as he is enjoying his preferred prelude to sex, he turns belly up under the firm hands.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>It starts sexy, but it isn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Birds, But Bees

**Author's Note:**

> TW: talk of past miscarriages

“Are there rules about this?” Charles moans in the pillow, because surely there are rules that govern Powers’ sex lives. He doesn’t mind his life being this good: having a sex partner that he’s incapable of exhausting, though he has to teach him how to behave appropriately in public. He certainly doesn’t mind having Erik as his in-house masseuse.

Erik doesn’t pause in the midst of kneading the knotted muscles of Charles’ lower back. He begins to answer with a request for clarification, but then picks up on Charles’ meaning through the bond. His hands do not pause, but they slow. “I’ve… adapted to follow laws of health; nothing I do will create a long-lasting effect on your body.”

There is a burr to Erik’s reply, but the mention of adaptation is new. Charles has been under the impression Erik adapts to those he imprints with. The Power once implied he’d always been bonded to Charles, but that has never made sense to Charles. Now he’s catching the faintest impression from Erik of somebody else. As much as he is enjoying his preferred prelude to sex, he turns belly up under the firm hands.

Erik’s face turns dark and troubled, his hands are holding still in the air above Charles’ lower abdomen. He’s seen Erik’s darker emotions before, but he’s never experienced his Power in emotional distress. Charles’ skin prickles into gooseflesh as Erik’s electromagnetic field pulses unexpectedly. It doesn’t hurt, but it isn’t pleasant.

Charles takes Erik’s hands. _Sit down. Relax._

Slowly, Erik’s thighs relax and he sinks down until his backside is resting on Charles’ thighs, where he was straddling him.

 _Now, tell me or show me._ Charles sends love and comfort through the connection. He can feel feeble disheartened attempts to accept his gifts. _What caused your adaptation to laws of health?_

“I don’t want to talk like that,” Erik barks. His lips curl back to expose his teeth. In the moonlight, they look too many and vicious. Then his hands curl into fists and quit the air to cover his eyes.

Charles has at no point felt frightened or worried for his safety. Even in his anger and turmoil, their connection is secure and ultimately loving. Erik is reacting like an animal to a wound that Charles never knew he had.

“Then let’s talk,” Charles suggests as feelings of impotence and grief begin to roll across him. There’s always been a weight to Erik, despite his fluidity, the slightest hint of neglected pain that flickers through him on rare occasions. Usually he gets flashes of things, scenes devoid of continuity, if he sees any of Erik’s past at all. It’s a part of his Manifestation.

“Magda,” Erik says as if the name is an encyclopedic response on the topic. Sometimes Erik can speak to Charles in such a manner; convey volumes with minimal words. It doesn’t happen this time.

Reaching slowly, Charles takes one of Erik’s fists down from his face. He breaks open the hand and slips his own into it. “Yes? You adapted for her?”

“Yes.” Erik keeps his other eye covered, but he looks down at Charles all the same. Crackles of light chase over the surface of his eye. “I released her from her body.”

Charles looks up, stunned. Erik killed a previous imprint? “Why did you adapt?

“To help her,” Erik replies, the light passing over his eye dims. He squeezes Charles’ hand lightly. “To stop her entropic spiral. But the timing was wrong; it didn’t stop.”

“Why was she entropic?” Charles asks, communicating love and understanding along their connection. It seems to help; Erik drops the other fist from his face in gradual increments.

“Issues of blood,” Erik says in a voice that is clipped and raw.

Erik’s words don’t convey the concept by themselves, but the impression behind them is there; Erik is speaking of miscarriages. Charles reaches and captures Erik’s other hand. Slowly, he sits up and pushes back on Erik’s hands, guiding him down to the slate blue sheets. Erik does not protest; his trust in Charles is absolute.

“Can Powers impregnate humans and mutants and vice versa?”

“Only a Power such as the Alexandrian could do so successfully,” Erik says quietly. “For the rest of us, there are only issues of blood.”

Charles catches images. Bizarre shapes. Clumps of brown hair and half-formed flesh. A finger and a tooth protrude from a flesh-tone blob. A brown eye in a melted bony orbit. There are six separate fleshy oddities in all. All six issued from a healthy young woman that desperately wanted to raise a family with her Power.

“You don’t have any DNA to pass on,” Charles says, with calm understanding, and a touch of wonder. In a small place in his mind, far away from Erik’s consciousness, Charles wonders, _Could he be any more alien?_

The failed pregnancy is an answer to a question long-pondered, but it brings no pleasure to Charles now. “But you must have sperm, unless you caused the egg to divide some other way. You know, a lab in Suwon has been working on unfertilized egg cleavage for years.”

Erik stills under Charles, his hands grow cold, there’s a sense of drawing away. Charles kicks himself mentally; he’s picked the wrong time to be a scientist. “I know you, Erik. You probably didn’t even know why it was happening.” He bends down over his Power’s bare torso, parts their hands to place a warm kiss over his heart.

“You relied on her to tell you what was needed,” Charles continues, testing their connection for truth’s resonance. The statement pings true. “Just as you rely on me to interpret the world for you when you don’t understand our culture or ethics. She was wrong, she didn’t know better, and you both were hurt.”

“Charles,” Erik’s frown deepens, the lines of his face are drawn, his brow furrowed, the blue-tinged light coming through the huge windows paint his face in dramatic shadows. “Let’s not share this. Let’s share other things. Nice things.”

He feels Erik’s distress, his continued feeling of retreat, the furious rage of a smelting pit sealed under a polar cap. “No, Erik, you can share this with me. I can help you take the burden; I’ll carry half and lessen the weight.”

“Even a fraction of eternity, is still eternity,” Erik replies. “Tell me about me about your fruit flies’ mosaics again, Charles. You feel lifted up when you talk about genetic mosaics.”

Using Erik’s hands for leverage, Charles straightens again from where he kneels between Erik’s thighs. He’d suspected there was a knot of pain curled deep in his Power, but he couldn’t understand how it could be so untempered.

“Very well,” Charles relents, still concerned, “but I want to know when you and Magda were together.”

He hates asking Erik questions of time and date, it is the Power’s greatest weakness, and readies himself for an answer he will have to puzzle over for days, with or without Hank’s intellect on his side. Normally, he would ask for an image, but he can feel Erik’s recalcitrance without trying.

Erik has an equal dislike for being asked the same kinds of questions, but he makes the attempt. He closes his eyes and begins to speak. “At this time there are dogs in the house. A fire set in the floor. There are horses. We bury the first one in cold weather. Storm is not manifest. It is hard to keep attuned to Dresden.”

“Did you ride a train?” Charles prompts. Dresden? Was Erik attuned to Dresden before Bashan?

“There are many trains,” Erik tries. “The city is dark. She calls me Max. I give the sixth to the ocean. I am discordant and entropic. I dissipate in the water. I manifest in Bashan.”

“So,” Charles soothes, rubbing his thumbs over Erik’s palms. “Shall I tell you of the X cell blastocysts or explain the creation of genetic mosaics in mitotic recombination?”

“Mosaics,” Erik affirms; the cloud over his features begins hesitantly to lift. Even though Charles knows Erik doesn’t understand a thing of blastocysts, chromosomes, or mosaics, the fact remains that the more carried away Charles get with a topic, the more Erik relaxes. Charles does his best to be carried away by his passion for biology, but when it comes to his Power, he is more human than he is scientist.

**Author's Note:**

> I think the word for these 'miscarriages' is parthenotes and (if I'm right) are the product of a rare process called parthonogenesis: an egg that develops without a sperm's fertilization.


End file.
